What add-in/setting in Visual Studio can you not live without? Which one improves your productivity or fixes something you can't stand in Visual Studio? Why is it your favorite?

My favorite is aspx edit helper because it does really improve my productivity when working with ASP.NET applications. What it does is provide a quick way to type out server side controls, it automatically fills in runat="server" and id="" and puts your cursor in between the quotes of ID so you can type it in.

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61 Answers
61

I couldnt live without instant gratification from OS_CompilationResult. (It feels gimmicky, but I havent gotten around to uninstalling and a key feature is that you can start a build with Shift Ctrl B, switch to something else and it prompts when the build is finished). Of course my real answer is a +1 for CodeRush/Refactor Pro

"you'll never want to work on a VS installation that doesn't have it" => that's precisely why I'm reluctant to try it... I'm not sure my company will be willing to pay for it ;)
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Thomas LevesqueSep 25 '09 at 0:10

I dunno, rockscroll... thought about smaller classes? I 'spose something that length is inevitable for a complex view with lots of widget event handlers but... you need to scroll through huge files a lot, really?
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Hamish SmithSep 20 '08 at 22:04

@Nippysaurus, I couldn't do without it. Being able to double click an identifier and instantly see where (or if) it is used in the rest of the file is a real time saver for me.
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BenjolOct 1 '09 at 6:26

Another great Visual Studio add-in is CodeKeep. CodeKeep is a website for storing snippets of code online for use later (kind of like an organized pastebin) and the Visual Studio Add-In integrates with it so you can have all your code snippets synchronized between all your systems.

Currently I love using StyleCop for Visual Studio. It is brilliant in assisting with Code Formatting and Rules. ALso it is a free product from Microsoft based on .Net Best Practices. As far as I know it only works for C#,

It has the potential to reduce context switches between VS and Windows Explorer (i.e. to get at Tortoise SVN or something) and has a neat feature that lets you start a command prompt in a directory in you source tree.

All but one of the Add-ins I use daily have already been mentioned by others, so I'll just throw in the Resource Refactoring Tool. Quite simply, it lets you take any hard-coded string, it creates a resource definition for it, and replaces all instances of that string in the entire project with a reference to the resource. Crazy handy when you have to write code with localization in mind.

VSCommands has lots of nifty frills for VS2010. Everyone will have a favorite - mine is the MSBuild summary dump, but I expect others will be interested in different parts. here's a pro edition, but the eval/community edition is worthwhile on its own in my experience.

Visual Local History Allows you to have a revision history for local projects that you haven't placed in source control yet. This gives you the ability to keep revisions even when you are creating test/throw away projects.